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 TEST CENTER Open source takes hold By Tom Yager August 24, 2001 IN EARLY 2000, it seemed as if no one was using open-source software for business-critical tasks. More than a year ago we asked members of InfoWorld's Corporate Advisory Board, who are IT executives of major companies and government agencies, about the role of open source in their organizations. They regarded open-source projects as experimental, a software curiosity that might be fun to tinker with but that couldn't be relied on.
About half of the CTOs we polled trust their business to open-source application development tools and application servers. Almost all respondents reported that open-source projects save their companies time and not just a little money. They report savings ranging from tens of thousands to hundreds of thousands of dollars, which is money being siphoned away from the pockets of commercial software vendors. Sometime during the past couple of years, big software companies took a wrong turn, and open source found a way to change how corporate America buys IT solutions. Huge software vendors were busy setting the stage for an open-source uprising even while they were pooh-poohing free -- meaning "unencumbered," not free of charge -- software's potential in business. These days, precious little software can be purchased for a flat fee. If a huge software vendor cannot impose a per-seat license fee, it charges a fee for each server CPU. When they can, these vendors remove crucial functionality from their software and charge purchasers to add it back in as "optional" modules or connectors. Minor version upgrades are now items that come with a price tag, and upgrade subscriptions have become trendy as a means of generating revenue. Even access to bug fixes is increasingly restricted to customers willing to subscribe. In what may be remembered as Big Software's step too far, vendors selling even modest solutions -- software that fits on a single CD-ROM and installs in an afternoon -- shifted en masse to a consulting model: no more shrink-wrapped boxes with manuals inside, no more standard functionality, and no more price lists on the vendor's Web site. In key markets such as CRM, ERP, and content management, buyers are often now required to pay for a team of consultants who fly in to handle the installation, custom-code a solution on site, and train your staff to use it. After they leave, you pay enormous yearly license fees for the privilege of running the software you just paid to have written for you. Major commercial software vendors don't have customers anymore -- they have clients. So it's no surprise that the majority of the CTOs we surveyed cite cost as the primary reason they're turning to open-source software. Linux, BSD, Apache, and Perl are solidly entrenched solutions in their categories; purveyors of commercial wares -- or software services, you might say -- are forced to sell against them. With these technologies addressed by a plethora of well-written books and a common part of most university curricula, selling against the open-source leaders is an increasingly difficult task. IT workers are now tuned in to open source before they even hit the job market, a fact that our survey respondents find appealing. Even when open-source solutions cost money, which is increasingly the case as their commercial potential is recognized, open source has advantages that commercial solutions can't match. If you have an employee on staff who understands an application's source code -- granted, our CTOs tell us this is a big "if" -- that code is better than all of the support contracts and vendors' consultants put together. If a vendor ceases support for your application or goes out of business, you're in bad shape. In contrast, if everyone associated with an open-source product that you're using suddenly disappears, you can still contract programmers to repair and enhance the code. That code is as much yours as it is anyone else's; you have something tangible to show for your money and an insurance policy against being abandoned or overcharged. Nevertheless, the surveyed CTOs still have substantial misgivings about open source. Penetration in the database, security, and storage categories remains low. But trust is building, fostered by open-source desktop OSes and application servers, the use of which was much higher among our survey respondents than we expected. But there is still ground to cover. A healthy majority of those surveyed are put off by open source's lack of vendor accountability. Many still believe that open-source solutions aren't as reliable or scalable as are commercial alternatives, and they have serious worries about technical support. So it speaks volumes that so many companies are setting these concerns aside, primarily to free themselves from software acquisition and maintenance costs that are spiraling out of control.  Technical Director Tom Yager (tom_yager@infoworld.com) is an IT veteran.
 RELATED ARTICLES  Test Center In Focus: Traveling the open-source road?RELATED SUBJECTS Software DevelopmentSPONSORED WHITE PAPERS 
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